Fractions (4 page)

Hell, maybe the backers were poor, maybe there wasn't some giant corporation or institution behind this after all…maybe the three men in front of her were the
whole thing
; what the front concealed was that it wasn't a front; What You See Is What You Get…True enough, the rest of the project was almost virtual – robot molecular analyses, computer molecular designs, automatic molecular production. It relied heavily on two techniques, parallel but almost precisely opposite. Genetic algorithms enabled random variations to be selected, varied, selected again in an analogue of Darwinian evolution, against a model of known chemical pathways in the human brain, which
ICI
-Bayer rented out at a few marks a nanosecond; like,
cheap.
Polymerase chain reactions enabled the selected molecules to be replicated in any necessary quantity, a process so thoroughly automated that the only human intervention required was washing out the kit.

But, ultimately, the product had to be tested in a living animal, and raw stuff from nature had to be tried out for potential; and at both ends of the cycle stood herself and a lot of white mice.

‘So perhaps you could give us a demonstration of your methods, Doctor Taine?'

Janis had a momentary fellow-feeling with a mouse in a maze: trapped and frantic. She had removed the door from the lab, lugged it to a skip, made sure the representatives of her sponsors entered by the side of the block away from the damaged wall. It wasn't that she intended to fudge the results, ignore the contamination and hope for the best. She fully intended to sacrifice the mice and start afresh. It was just that there wasn't time to do it before she had to demonstrate her competence, and she was afraid that, if she had nothing to demonstrate, the sponsors would sacrifice
her
and start afresh. She saw a fleeting, mad vision of what she would do if they ever found out – throw it all up and become a creep, wear plastic and live off the land and break into psychology labs and free the flatworms, blow up whale-ships to save the krill…

Three men in dark suits looked at her. She tried not to think of the many jokes beginning
There was a Pole, a German and a Russian
…Gently, she took a mouse from one of the cages and placed it in the entry to the maze. It sniffed around the little space, squeaking.

‘We have here a subject: the
s
, as we call it. In a moment I'll open the entry door and it'll attempt to find a way through this maze of transparent tubing. All the subjects – the experimentals and the controls – have already learned a path through the maze. The experimentals have received mild doses of the various preparations in their water, taken
ad libitum.
This particular subject is one of a group which has received a locally obtained psylocibe derivative. The mean time hitherto has been around seventy seconds—'

‘For both the experimentals and the controls?' the Pole asked.

Janis released the entry lever and the mouse sauntered down the pipe. ‘Yes. I don't wish to obscure the fact that, so far, the null hypothesis—'

ping

The
s
had pressed the switch at the end of the maze and was nibbling its reinforcer, a square centimetre of marmalade toast. The timer, wired to the exit lever and the reward switch, stood at 32 seconds.

Silently, Janis removed the mouse and tried again with a control.

She ran through a dozen variations: mice doped with betel-juice, opiates, coca, caffeine…

It wasn't a fluke, the psylocibe-heads were consistently twice as fast, way outside even experimenter effect.

She stared at the men, puzzled.

‘I must set up some double-blind protocols,' she said. ‘Up to now, frankly, it hasn't been worth it. At least, I assume you were interested in
major
effects.'

‘We certainly are,' said the German. ‘And this isn't a new preparation?'

‘Cumulative?' said the Russian when Janis shook her head.

‘It's possible. Obviously, more…'

‘Research is necessary, huh?'

They all laughed.

She worried that they'd think it was a set-up, lowering their expectations like that and then producing something so interesting; but no, they were sold on it. Her contract was renewed for six months; she was to take on a technician, check out all the possibilities.

As she escorted them down the corridor the Russian sniffed. He nudged her.

‘Is maybe not patriotic,' he said, ‘but the Lebanese is better, no?'

She smiled back at him blankly, then quickened her pace to hide her blush.

Oh shit.

 

Fonthill Road, centre of the garment district. Great automatic factories spun and wove, cut and stitched in towers of glass and steel. The car-free street thronged with people who all, especially the women, seemed to Jordan to take up far too much space: jammed with bustles, he thought dourly as he skirted crinolines, ducked under parasols, manoeuvred around trains. Modesty's own window displays – with their fractal chintzes, Mandelbrot paisleys and swathes of computer-generated lace applied as if with a spray-gun to every conceivable garment surface and trim – looked tasteful and restrained against the styles of the Bible-belts of Florida, Liberia and everywhere else that everybody's daughter wanted to look like a televangelist's wife.

Four minutes after noon. Five people ahead of him in the queue for the Bundesbank cashpoint at the corner of Seven Sisters Road. Jordan shuffled and fumed, stared over their heads at the Fuller domes of the old Development Area. He keyed in the number at 12.13. The machine laboured and muttered to itself for forty finger-drumming seconds, then coughed and spat out a thick wad of crumpled currency. And another, and again.

Jordan snatched them up and almost ran off while the screen was still offering a succession of financial services in what seemed increasingly desperate pleas to get the money back.

Back at the office building he headed straight for the toilet and locked himself away in a lavatory stall. He knew he was safe there – say what you like about the Elders, they were genuine about certain kinds of privacy. It was understood that God was watching. Jordan suddenly discovered that he really needed to shit. He sat down and counted the money. Four thousand Britische marks. He felt the blood leave his head, his bowels turn to water.

The B-mark was the hardest of hard currencies – only Norlonto used it internally, and even there four thousand would last a couple of months. In the community economies you could get laughable sums of funny money for it, even after bribing the guards. For a hundred B-marks your average checkpoint charlie would sell you his Kalashnikov and probably his sister's address.

Jordan stared at the white paint of the stall door, losing himself like he sometimes did at the screen. Nothing seemed real. He remembered a word of wisdom that he had once, delightedly, checked out in a lucid dream:
If you can fly, you're dreaming.
He thought about it for a minute, and no, he didn't float upwards…

Just as well, because his trousers were around his ankles.

When he stepped through the door of the office he found everybody yelling at everybody else.

‘What's going on?' he asked.

That got all those in earshot yelling at him. Mrs Lawson pushed her way through. He was relieved to see she looked relieved to see him. She grabbed his elbow and tugged him towards his own screen. He stared at it. Bands of colour warped and writhed, almost hypnotically complex patterns appearing momentarily and then changing before he could appreciate them.

‘This has got to be a terminal malfunction,' he said. ‘Either that or the world economy has gone to h – Hades!' He recalled the window displays. ‘It's not, uh, some designer's palette that's got its wires crossed with our system?'

‘Nice try,' Mrs Lawson said. ‘Just don't suggest it to the designers – they're practically hysterical already.'

She glared around and several people slunk back abashed.

‘The engineers have been in all lunchtime and assure us there's nothing wrong with the hardware. And, yes, we have checked and it
isn't
– hee hee – the
terminal crisis
of capitalism, either.'

A lowercase thought slid along the bottom of Jordan's mind.

our sleeper viruses have survived twenty years

The room swayed slightly. Get a grip.

‘It's all right,' he said, loud enough to be heard by enough people to amplify and spread the phony reassurance. ‘I have an idea as to what's behind this. I'll just have to check over some of your files, Mrs Lawson.'

He looked her in the eye and gave a tiny jerk of his head.

‘OK.' She raised her voice to a pitch and volume that reminded him she'd once been a schoolteacher. ‘Do something else!' she said to the rest of the room. ‘Read a manual if you have to!'

She shut the office door firmly behind them.

‘This place secure?' he said immediately.

‘If it isn't, nowhere is.'

‘Do you have a landlink to the security forces? The real ones I mean, uh, no offence to the Warriors—'

‘None taken.'

She smiled at his visible shock. Jordan continued hurriedly: ‘Could you check that the subversives aren't starting a big push?'

She said nothing.

‘Look, I'm not suggesting that any of their, uh,
black
propaganda is true but they might be getting into sabotage…'

He trailed off, feeling he'd said too much.

‘That's a point. Besides, it could be more, well, local forces, shall we say? Some anti-Christian faction.'

Mrs Lawson picked up a phone and walked about with it, talking in the clipped argot of the security professional. (God, he'd never suspected she was a
cop
!)

‘—sitrep update request,
BC
. Check
ECM
on
LANS
…yes…OK negative on target specificity…copy, got you, logging out.'

She clicked the phone off.

‘We're not the only ones. Some of our commercial rivals and ideological opponents are getting system crashes as well, but none of the core state or corporate networks have any problems. Doesn't fit any known attack profile, doesn't fit anything apart from the issue I raised this morning.'

‘Well, I certainly didn't expect anything like this…so soon.'

Mrs Lawson nodded briskly, as if not paying attention.

‘You couldn't be expected to. You're not a big loop, Jordan – you're not my main source of ideas. I want you to watch out, yes, you have a knack. But to be honest I've had the same theories run through by the leading Warriors already. I was just checking that the projections held.'

She paused, her face suddenly bleak.

‘I know I can trust you to keep this to yourself – not because I know you're clean, but because I know for a fact you're not. Take that spiritual-virgin look off your face! Do you think – no, you're far too smart to think – an outfit like
BC
survives in this tough world on censored texts? We have to know the psychology, know the philosophies, of that world. Take what we can and trust in God to keep us from corruption! The Elders and Deacons have read and seen things – and done things – that would make the hair on your devious, secretly sceptical head stand on end! The
ANR
! Don't talk to me about the
ANR
– don't pretend
not
to talk about them. They don't worry me. What I fear, what I truly pray we are not faced with, is the coming of the Watchmaker.'

‘What is the Watchmaker?'

He already knew: he'd read the book. He still hoped she didn't know he had.

‘You can read the book,' she said. ‘I'll give you clearance.'

Mrs Lawson fiddled with the coffee percolator, poured two cups and sat down. Jordan accepted a cup and remained standing. He wondered how secure the door would be against a good kick.

‘Dawkins, R. Nineteen eighty something. We're not bothered by all the arguments about the evolution of life. We've got fallback interpretations if that theory's ever absolutely proved. The thing which had many better minds worried was the idea that natural selection could happen, could irrefutably happen, in a computer system. Intelligence could evolve out of the bugs and viruses in software. Something not human, not angelic, possibly diabolic. The
Blind
Watchmaker. Life made the
devil
's way – by evolution, not creation.'

She fell silent, looking at him as if she were watching something behind him. Jordan decided not to throw in a suspiciously knowledgeable comment on the semantic slippage which confused the process and the product, the creator and its creation. Just as the name of Frankenstein had become irremediably tagged to the monster, so the long-imagined, long-dreaded spontaneously evolved artificial intelligence was stamped with the name of the process that would give it birth. ‘When the Watchmaker comes…' Another bit of the buzz he occasionally glimpsed in hastily scanned chatfiles the censorship hadn't quite caught up with. Another urban legend.

He finished his coffee and said edgily, ‘Can we be sure?'

He felt he had just been initiated, if not baptised and confirmed, into some alternative theology, the real thinking of the real minds that ran the place – still orthodox, he could see that, though not the sort of thing they'd want to slot on a satellite for prime time – and all he could respond with was his own self-corroding scepticism.

‘Of course we can't be sure,' Mrs Lawson said. ‘Oh, Jordan, don't you know
anything?
'

 

The system came back up, just as inexplicably, twenty minutes later. Melody Lawson sat in her office and looked at the monitor screens, frowning to herself as she watched Jordan logging on. She'd as good as invited him to move on from the naive fundamentals that were enough for the pew-ballast to the more sophisticated understanding necessary to protect that very simplicity, and he'd not risen to it at all. Any bright young Christian with a questioning mind would have been in like a ferret, eager to explore a legitimization of his more daring thoughts. There was no doubt Jordan was bright, but he sure as hell wasn't a Christian. It galled her the kid was so transparent, and that nobody else saw through him. It galled her even more that whatever had undermined his belief in God had also diminished his belief in himself. Open irreligion could not be permitted, and she had no problem with that, but closet atheism was far more poisonous. There was no telling when such suppressed, turned-in hostility could lash out in a desperate act. For Jordan to leave Beulah City would be better for the community, and better for him.